Friends and Foes in the Real Estate Industry: A Review of Dan Garodnick’s Saving Stuyvesant Town
Reviewed by Kevin Ritter
Stuyvesant Town, a middle income housing development on Manhattan’s East Side, has been a consistent site of conflict and controversy in New York City since its creation in the 1940s. Dan Garodnick’s new book, Saving Stuyvesant Town: How One Community Defeated the Worst Real Estate Deal in History, covers the story of the development from its origins as a postwar housing development built on top of the former Gashouse District, which ha been cleared of its residents through eminent domain, to 21st century real estate dealings that threatened to displace many of the property’s rent stabilized tenants in favor of new market-rate residents.
In Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11 Boat Lift (Cornell University Press, 2021), Jessica DuLong reveals the dramatic story of how the New York Harbor maritime community heroically delivered stranded commuters, residents, and visitors out of harm's way.
“We Accuse”: The Harlem Rebellion, Bill Epton’s Anti-Carceral Activism, and the rise of the Surveillance State
By Joseph Kaplan
On July 16th, 1964, a mere three weeks after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, off-duty police officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen-year-old Black student James Powell outside of Harlem’s Robert Wagner Junior High School. Gilligan claimed that he shot the 5’6” 122-pound Powell in self-defense when the teenager charged him with a knife, a claim disputed by several of Powell’s classmates. While the events of that day remain contested, there is firm agreement that this was the spark for the first major urban rebellion of the 1960s.
Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical, now turned feature film, has brought increased attention to northern Manhattan above 155th Street. In the Heights depicts a vibrant Latinx community facing the challenges of gentrification, immigration policy, educational and economic inequality, and stereotyping. If we were to travel back in time to the northern Manhattan of Alexander Hamilton’s era, we would find a very different landscape than the one we see today in Washington Heights and neighboring Inwood to the north and Harlem to the south. That is true whether our observations are based on actual encounters with place or representations on the stage or screen.
Review: Robert A. McCaughey’s A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard
Reviewed by Kelly Marino
In A College of Her Own, scholar Robert McCaughey examines the history of Barnard College and the changes in its leadership, programs, and demographics from its founding in 1889 to the present. He argues that the school's administrators, location in New York City, and relationship with Columbia University made Barnard distinct among the “Seven Sisters,'' the group of elite women’s liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
Dead Rivers and Day’s End: Cruising and Preserving New York’s Queer Imaginaries
By Fiona Anderson
Whenever I’m in New York, I make a point of spending time looking at the wooden pilings that stand in the Hudson, remnants of the warehouses and piers that occupied the waterfront until the mid-1980s. Gathered together in intimate coalition, they jut up and out along the riverside like rugged swimmers leaping in to rescue a drowning comrade. They look both like placeholders for future construction and hardy traces of a long-lost culture, like a forgotten work by Robert Smithson or an American Pompeii. This area is the subject of my recent book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019),which looks at how and why this site hosted a vibrant cruising scene and art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The First Cinemas in Black Harlem: A Look at the Silent Film Era, 1909-1926
By Agata Frymus
The history of cinemas in Harlem is as old — or, in fact a few years older — than its history as a lively center of Black life. Movie houses that opened their doors to African Americans in the late 1900s and early 1910s offer a fascinating insight into the history of Harlem’s residents.
“Young people are making their voices heard”: From Harlem’s Youth Movement in the 1930s and 1940s to DSA-NYC
By Mary Reynolds
The ongoing press scrum over New York’s 2021 mayoral election has obscured the down-ticket candidates in the June 22 primary races for the City’s fifty-one Council seats. These contests could be better bellwethers for the city’s future, and recall a little-known era of the city’s radical past.
Friday, Bloody Friday: David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot
Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe
David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution focuses on May 8, 1970, a symbolic date in the exodus of such voters from the “New Deal Coalition.” On that day hundreds of blue-collar workers — many of them construction workers building the World Trade Center — converged in the streets of lower Manhattan, chanting “U—S—A. All the Way!” as they physically attacked students protesting the Vietnam War. Over one hundred students, bystanders, and others were injured in the melee on the streets.
